Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Wyeth the aesthete

Edmund Wilson referred to fellow Princetonian John Allan Wyeth as "the only aesthete in the Class of 1915", a comment for which we have had very little context, knowing nothing of Wyeth's poetic composition prior to This Man's Army. However, this evening I received a message from Roger Allen, alerting me to a poem, "The Song of the Wind", published by Wyeth in the periodical The Forum in 1914, during Wyeth's penultimate year at Princeton, and it is now easy to see what Wilson meant, as the poem could fairly be described as an example of pure 1890s Aestheticism. If there is any link between the dreamy ennui of "The Song of the Wind" and the crisp precision of his later war sonnets, it is in Wyeth's interest in metrical innovation, already present in this early poem, and in the relation between a word's sound and its meaning, which he explores here, and will later exploit with great effect in the sonnets. My thanks to Mr. Allen for his excellent detective work and for his consideration in bringing this poem to my attention. In the pre-Web years when I was first researching Wyeth, I made a thorough search of the Index to Periodical Literature from about 1910 on for anything he might have published, but I completely missed this poem.

The Song of the Wind I love to dream in the sun,

Here where the fields are still

With the silence of life,

Here where the fields are still

With the beauty of life . . .

And the flowers dream in the sun,

And the river, half asleep, and the dream of the river is mine.

The dreams of the flowers are mine

And we are one . . .

But I tire, soon, and I long

To trouble the rest of all . . .

And the river stirs at my call

And the flowers tremble and sway

And the leaves have begun their song . . .

But I have lost my dream.

And search as I may

It angers me that in vain

I search for a thing that is lost . . .

It angers me that in vain

The fallen leaves are tossed.

That I plunge my hands in the grass;

That I turn and. turn as I pass.

With ever a sidelong glance

Over the field . . .

There shall I find my dream.

Where the willows shield

The hidden breast of the stream.

And the sly reeds dance . . .

But in vain

I search in the mantle of leaves where the sunlight slants,

And down in the reeds that strain

At my touch, and down in the water that clouds like a shattered glass,

Can't find anything about the play or more details. However, the Confederate Veteran archives I used aren't complete- there could be a memoir of John Allan Wyeth Sr. there. Wyeth's brother, Marion Sims Wyeth, was a distinguished architect and his nephew, also Marion Sims Wyeth, who died last year, was a distinguished editor for Harper Collins.

"Of all the writers of the Lost Generation, there was perhaps none quite so lost as John Allan Wyeth. Until his 1928 book of war poems was reprinted by Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli in 2008 (This Man's Army, Univ of SC Press), Wyeth’s literary reputation was non-existent. Not a single scholar of the period had written about him, or even heard of him, and his poems appeared in no anthology of First World War literature from the 1930s to the present. Yet it might have been otherwise. Wyeth had all the requisite credentials of the time for literary fame: an Ivy League education, participation in the World War, followed by nearly two decades as an itinerant expatriate in London, Liège, Paris, Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Provence, Italy and Greece, first as a poet, and then as a painter. Moreover, he was known to Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, members of the Bloomsbury Group and Ezra Pound. His cycle of modernist war sonnets, when it appeared a year before A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front, was perceptively and appreciatively reviewed in a handful of journals, including Poetry. Yet Oblivion followed, swift and absolute, for the next eighty-odd years. Such are the inexplicable vagaries of literary fortune ..."

from BJ Omanson's "John Allan Wyeth: Lost Poet of the Lost Generation". The Best American Poetry. 27 May 2012. (see link below)

Preston, John Hyde. "Poetry, Giants and Lollypops".The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1929. An enthusiastic review of This Man's Army as part of an omnibus review of new poetry titles of 1928. ". . . a corking, exciting piece of work . . . "